Show Notes
I swore up and down I would not release a newsletter this week owing to the July 4th holiday (Treason day for the Brits out there), and then Microsoft's Github
announced and released Github Copilot, and my promise fell apart.
It's almost trite to call these 'bugs', these aren't bugs. These aren't misunderstandings of product requirements, or bad coding. No, these are Ian Malcoms:
Your scientists engineers were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should. (original source)
AI and ML have given us a new class of software defect: the Ian Malcom, and we can thank Github for playing the role of movie villian here.
With that out of the way, here's what else happened last week in .NET.
🎭 There was a
LinkedIn Breach announced on June 29th, with the field "Inferred Salary" included. Since no one knows what "inferred" means here, we'll just go with the face-value interpretation that LinkedIn calculates what your salary should be based on your experience and roles and local market and that is exactly why naming is so important in software.
🍞 I got a little flak last week for suggesting that Azure Static Web Apps were mundane but being touted as The Next Great Invention After Sliced Bread, and
here's just another example. Now, I
get that if you work at Azure, you should be touting Azure products -- but my concern here is that treating something mundane like Static site hosting as revolutionary in your verbiage (
awesome, awe inspiring? Really?) is overplaying the marketing angle without understanding that a crucial part of marketing is credibility, and it's easy to lose it if you overplay your hand.
And that's it for what happened Last Week in .NET. I'm especially interested to see if there's any legal action around CoPilot (ha), and how bad PrintNightmare turns out to be, so if either of those get more press, you'll hear about it here.